jayanta mahapatra - poems - - poemhunter.com: … has authored 18 books of poems. he started writing...

Classic Poetry Series

Jayanta Mahapatra- poems -

Publication Date: 2012

Publisher:Poemhunter.com - The World's Poetry Archive

Jayanta Mahapatra(22 October 1928 -) Jayanta Mahapatra is one of the best known Indian English poets. Perhaps anydiscussion on Indian English Poetry is incomplete without reference to hispoetical works. Physicist, bilingual poet and essayist, Jayanta Mahapatra holdsthe distinction of being the first Indian English poet to have received the SahityaAkademi Award (1981) for Relationship. In 2009 he was awarded by Governmentof India with "Padmashree Award", country's most prestigious award for civiliancitizen for his out standing contribution to the field of literature. Birth and Early Life Jayanta Mahapatra, born on 22 October 1928 in Cuttack ( India ), belongs to alower middle-class family. He had his early education at Stewart school, Cuttack .After a first class Master's Degree in Physics, he joined as a teacher in 1949 andserved in different Government colleges of Orissa. Later Life All his working life, he taught physics at different colleges in Orissa. He retired in1986. Mahapatra has authored 18 books of poems. He started writing poetry atthe age of thirty-eight, quite late by normal standards. Mahapatra's tryst with themuse came rather late in life. He published his first poems in his early 40s. Thepublication of his first book of poems, Svayamvara and Other Poems, in 1971was followed by the publication of Close the Sky, Ten By Ten. His collections of poems include A Rain of Rites, Life Signs and A Whiteness ofBone. One of Mahapatra's better remembered works is the long poemRelationship, for which he won the Sahitya Akademi award in 1981. He is thefirst Indian English Poet to receive the honor. Besides being one of the mostpopular Indian poets of his generation, Mahapatra was also part of the trio ofpoets who laid the foundations of modern Indian English Poetry. He shared aspecial bond with A. K. Ramanujan, one the finest poets in the IEP tradition.Mahapatra is also different in not being a product of the Bombay school of poets.Over time, he has managed to carve a quiet, tranquil poetic voice of his own--distinctly different from those of his contemporaries. His wordy lyricism combinedwith authentic Indian themes puts him in a league of his own. His recent poetry volumes include Shadow Space, Bare Face and RandomDescent. Besides poetry, he has experimented widely with myriad forms ofprose. His lone published book of prose remains The Green Gardener, a collection

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of short stories. A distinguished editor, Jayanta Mahapatrahas been bringing out,for many years, a literary magazine, Chandrabhaga , from Cuttack . Themagazine is named after Chandrabhaga, a prominent but dried-up river inOrissa. Vision of Poetry “To Orissa, to this land in which my roots lie and lies my past and in which liesmy beginning and my end..." declared the poet in his Award-receiving speech atthe Sahitya Akademi, New Delhi. The clue to understand Mahapatra’s poetry is given by the poet himself:“My poems deal with the life within myself where the mind tries to find a sort ofcoherence from the mass ofthings in the world outside it.” Awards Second Prize International Who’s Who in Poetry, London, 1970.Jacob Glatstein Memorial Award Poetry, Chicago, 1975.Visiting Writer International Writing Program, Iowa City 1976-77.Cultural Award Visitor, Australia, 1978.Japan Foundation Visitor’s Award, Japan, 1980.Sahitya Academy Award National Academy of Letters, New Delhi, 1981.Invited Poet Asian Poets Conference, Tokyo, Japan, 1984.Indo-Soviet Cultural Exchange Writer, USSR, 1985.Resident Writer Centro Culturale della Fondazione Rockefeller, Bellagio, Italy,1986.Invited Poet University of Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur, 1988.Singapore Festival of Arts, Singapore. 1988.New Literatures in English Conference, Justus-Liebig-Universitat, Giessen,West Germany, 1989ACLALS Silver Jubilee Conference, Canterbury, England, 1989.First Prize Scottish International Open Poetry Competition, 1990.Invited Poet Poetry International, The South Bank Centre, London, England,1992.Cuirt International Poetry Festival, Galway, Ireland, 1992.EI Consejo Nacional Para la Cultura y las Artes, Mexico. 1994Mingei International Museum of World Folk Art, La Jolla, USA. 1994.Gangadhar National Award For Poetry, Sambalpur University, 1994Ramakrishna Jaidayal Harmony Award, 1994, New Delhi.Vaikom Mohammad Basheer Chair Mahatma Gandhi University, Kottayam, 1996-

97.Invited Poet ACLALS Conference, Kandy, Sri Lanka, 1998.Awarded Honorary Degree Doctor of Literature, Utkal University, Bhubaneswar,2006.Invited Poet Weltklang Poetry Festival, Berlin, Germany, 2006.Bishuva Award Prajatantra Prachara Samiti, Cuttack, 2007.Padma Shree Award India’s Padma Shree Award, 2009.SAARC Literary Award, New Delhi, 2010 Poetry Readings Outside India University of Iowa, Iowa City, 1976University of Tennessee, Chattanooga, 1976University of the South, Sewanee, 1976East West Center, Honolulu, Hawaii, 1976Adelaide Festival of Arts, Adelaide, 1978P.E.N. Centre, Sydney, 1978Australian National University, Canberra, 1978International Poets Conference, Tokyo, 1980Asian Poets Conference, Tokyo, 1984Aoyama University, Tokyo, 1984Sapporo University, Sapporo, 1984Writers Union, Moscow, Leningrad & Lvov, USSR, 1985Singapore Festival of Arts, Singapore, 1988Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka, Kuala Lumpur, 1988University of Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur, 1988Universitas Indonesia, Jakarta, 1988University of the Philippines, Manila City, 1988Museong Kalinangang Pilipino, Manila, 1988Irish Writers Centre, Dublin, Ireland, 1992Sligo Arts Centre, The Grammar School, Sligo, 1992The Guild Hall, Derry, 1992WEA, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Hexham and Durham, 1992The South Bank Centre, London, 1992Universities of Hull and Leeds (UK), 1992The Naropa Institute, Boulder,Colorado, 1994Instituto de Cultura de Campeche, Mexico, 1994Instituto de Cultura de Puebla, Mexico,1994Clark Atlanta University, Atlanta, USA, 1995Hunter College, New York, USA, 1995

University of the South, Sewanee, USA, 1995Writers Forum, De Kalb College, Atlanta, USA, 1995Writers Forum, St. Andrews College, Laurinburg, USA, 1995British Council, Kandy, 1998Indian Cultural Centre, Colombo, 1998 In India Andhra University, University of Jadavpur, Calcutta University, University ofDelhi, Osmania University, The Poetry Centre - Hyderabad, Visva-Bharati -Santiniketan, North East Hill University - Shillong, Tezpur University - IITGuwahati, India International Centre - New Delhi, Bharat Bhavan - Bhopal,University of Lucknow, DAV College - Kanpur, Arts, Science & Commerce College- Durg.

A Grey Haze Over the Ricefields A grey haze over the ricefields.The black cow grazing with her new-born calf,long-legged, unsteady—or trucks going past the high road:such things only claimthat I am looking out in search of memory,not death. Those little kisses on our cheeksmy long-dead grandmother gave me, orthe soft dampness of my tears whenmy mother did not notice mefrom beyond the closed door of her youth. Today the dangling thread stops half-way down,where my hands cannot touch it.It's not that I wait for judgment.But at times I see a shadowmove slowly over these, a shadow freedfrom the past and from the future,that contains the footsteps of that childhoodso light I can only think of squirrelsslipping in and out of the mango trees. Jayanta Mahapatra


A Missing Person In the darkened rooma womancannot find her reflection in the mirror waiting as usualat the edge of sleep In her hands she holdsthe oil lampwhose drunken yellow flamesknow where her lonely body hides Jayanta Mahapatra


A Rain Of Rites Sometims a rain comesslowly across the sky, that turnsupon its grey cloud, breaking away into lightbefore it reaches its objective. The rain I have known and traded all this lifeis thrown like kelp on the beach.Like some shape of conscience I cannot look at,a malignant purpose is a nun's eye. Who was the last man on earth,to whom the cold cloud brought the blood to his face?[?]Numbly I climb to the mountain-tops of ourswhere my own soul quivers on the edge of answers. Which still, stale air sits on an angel's wings?What holds my rain so it's hard to overcome? Jayanta Mahapatra


A Summer Poem Over the soughing of the sombre windpriests chant louder than ever;the mouth of India opens. Crocodiles move into deeper waters. Mornings of heated middenssmoke under the sun. The good wifelies in my bedthrough the long afternoon;dreaming still, unexhaustedby the deep roar of funeral pyres. [Note: midden = dunghill] Jayanta Mahapatra


Ash The substance that stirs in my palmcould well be a dead man; no needto show surprise at the dizzy acts of wind.My old father sitting uncertainly three feet away is the slow cloud against the sky:so my heart's beating makes of me a survivorover here where the sun quietly sets.The ways of freeing myself: the glittering flowers, the immensity of rain for example,which were limited to promises oncehave had the lie to themselves. And the wind,that had made simple revelation in the leaves, plays upon the ascetic-faced vision of waters;and without thinkingsomething makes me keep close to the wallsas though I was afraid of that justice in the shadows. Now the world passes into my eye:the birds flutter toward rest around the tree,the clock jerks each memory towardsthe present to become a past, floating awaylike ash, over the bank. My own stirrings like the wind'skeep hoping for the solace that would be mein my father's eyesto pour the good years back on my; the dead man who licks my palmsis more likely to encourage my dark intolerancerather than turn metoward some strangely solemn charade: the dumb order of the mythlined up in the life-field,the unconcerned wind perhaps truer than the rest,


rustling the empty, bodiless grains. Jayanta Mahapatra


Dawn At Puri Endless crow noisesA skull in the holy sandstilts its empty country towards hunger. White-clad widowed Womenpast the centers of their livesare waiting to enter the Great Temple Their austere eyesstare like those caught in a nethanging by the dawn's shining strands of faith. The fail early light catchesruined, leprous shells leaning against one another,a mass of crouched faces without names, and suddenly breaks out of my hideinto the smoky blaze of a sullen solitary pyrethat fills my aging mother: her last wish to be cremated here twisting uncertainly like lighton the shifting sands Jayanta Mahapatra


Deaths in Orissa Faces of tree-bark and griefhang against God's hand in the worldthat cannot lift itself up to help.In the corners of women's eyesthe rainbow breaks against the sunrise. Nothing but the paddy's twisted throatexposed on the crippled bleak earth,nothing but impotence in lowered eyes,nothing but the tightening of the musclesin Bhagyabati's neck which her outcaste motherwould herself have liked to throttle to death,nothing but the cries of shriveled womencracking against the bloodied altar of Man,nothing but the moment of fearwhen they need a God who can do them some good. Oh I am a poet who barks like a dog.Open the window, I say, so I can breathe.Let not my memory be like a tiger in ambush.But there is this dangerously alive bodyand only a baton or knife can tear it apart. Jayanta Mahapatra


Dhauli Afterwards when the wars of Kalinga were over,the fallow fields of Dhaulihid the blood-spilt butchered bodies. [originally 'red-smeared voiceless bodies'] As the earthburrowed into their dead hungerwith its mercilesss worms, [was 'tortured worms']guided the foxes to their limp genitals. Years later, the evening wind,trembling the glazed waters of the River Daya,keens in the rock edicts the vain word,like the voiceless cicadas of night: [was 'shuttered silence, an air:'] the measure of Ashoka's sufferingdoes not appear enough.The place of his pain peers lamentablyfrom among the pains of the dead. Jayanta Mahapatra


Freedom At times, as I watch,it seems as though my country's bodyfloats down somewhere on the river. Left alone, I grow intoa half-disembodied bamboo,its lower part sunkinto itself on the bank. Here, old widows and dying mencherish their freedom,bowing time after time in obstinate prayers. While children screamwith this desire for freedomto transform the worldwithout even laying hands on it. In my blindness, at times I fearI'd wander back to either of them.In order for me not to lose face,it is necessary for me to be alone. Not to meet the woman and her childin that remote village in the hillswho never had even a little ricefor their one daily meal these fifty years. And not to see the uncaught, bloodied lightof sunsets cling to the tall white columnsof Parliament House. In the new temple man has built nearby,the priest is the one who knows freedom,while God hides in the dark like an alien. And each day I keep looking for the lightshadows find excuses to keep.


Trying to find the only freedom I know,the freedom of the body when it's alone. The freedom of the silent shale, the moonless coal,the beds of streams of the sleeping god. I keep the ashes away,try not to wear them on my forehead. Jayanta Mahapatra


Genesis The apple sits on an old examination bedin the world's foyer. The stony silence of the men staring hardcrosses the line of sanity. Why do I think of this,drowning in the depth of lost time? Maybe nothing came from anything,a long drawn-out yawn from nowhere. Maybe my mother's soul set the apple free,making it roll down the road. And I look for the same sense of stillness,hoping it will heal me. The myth has its head stuck in the fork of a tree.And the spirits of knowledge won't let it pass. Jayanta Mahapatra


Grandfather The yellowed diary's notes whisper in vernacular. They sound the forgotten posture, the cramped cry that forces me to hear that voice. Now I stumble back in your black-paged wake. No uneasy stir of cloud darkened the white skies of your day; the silence of dust grazed in the long afterniin sun, ruling the cracked fallow earth, ate into the laughter of your flesh. For you it was the hardest question of all. Dead, empty tress stood by the dragging river, past your weakened body, flailing against your sleep. You thought of the way the jackals moved, to move. Did you hear the young tamarind leaves rustle in the cold mean nights of your belly? Did you see your own death? Watch it tear at your cries, break them into fits of unnatural laughter? How old were you? Hunted, you turned coward and ran, the real animal in you plunigng through your bone. You left your family behind, the buried things, the precious clod that praised the quality of a god. The impersihable that swung your broken body, turned it inside out? What did faith matter? What Hindu world so ancient and true for you to hold? Uneasily you dreamed toward the center of your web. The separate life let you survive, while perhaps the one you left wept in the blur of your heart. Now in a night of sleep and taunting rain My son and I speak of that famine nameless as snow. A conscience of years is between us. He is young. The whirls of glory are breaking down for him before me. Does he think of the past as a loss we have lived, our own? Out of silence we look back now at what we do not know.


There is a dawn waiting beside us, whose signs are a hundred odd years away from you, Grandfather. You are an invisible piece on a board Whose move has made our children grow, to know us, carrying us deep where our voices lapse into silence. We wish we knew you more. We wish we knew what it was to be, against dying, to know the dignity that had to be earned dangerously, your last chance that was blindly terrifying, so unfair. We wish we had not to wake up with our smiles in the middle of some social order. Jayanta Mahapatra


Her Hand The little girl's hand is made of darknessHow will I hold it? The streetlamps hang like decapitated headsBlood opens that terrible door between us The wide mouth of the country is clamped in painwhile its body writhes on its bed of nails This little girl has just her raped bodyfor me to reach her The weight of my guilt is unableto overcome my resistance to hug her Jayanta Mahapatra


Hunger It was hard to believe the flesh was heavy on my back.The fisherman said: Will you have her, carelessly,trailing his nets and his nerves, as though his wordssanctified the purpose with which he faced himself.I saw his white bone thrash his eyes. I followed him across the sprawling sands,my mind thumping in the flesh's sling.Hope lay perhaps in burning the house I lived in.Silence gripped my sleeves; his body clawed at the frothhis old nets had only dragged up from the seas. In the flickering dark his lean-to opened like a wound.The wind was I, and the days and nights before.Palm fronds scratched my skin. Inside the shackan oil lamp splayed the hours bunched to those walls.Over and over the sticky soot crossed the space of my mind. I heard him say: My daughter, she's just turned fifteen...Feel her. I'll be back soon, your bus leaves at nine.The sky fell on me, and a father's exhausted wile.Long and lean, her years were cold as rubber.She opened her wormy legs wide. I felt the hunger there,the other one, the fish slithering, turning inside Jayanta Mahapatra


Main Temple Street Children, brown as earth, continue to laugh awayat cripples and mating mongrels.Nobody ever bothers about them. The temple points to unending rhythm. On the dusty street the colour of shorn scalpthere are things moving all the timeand yet nothing seems to go away from sight. Injuries drowsy with the heat. And that sky there,claimed by inviolable authority,hanging on to its crutches of silence. Jayanta Mahapatra


Myth Years drift sluggishly through the air,is a chanting, the long years, an incense.Face upon face returns to the barbed horizonsof the foggy temple; here liesa crumpled leaf, a filthy scarlet flowerout of placeless pasts, on the motionless stairs. Old brassy bellsmoulded by memories, dark, unfulfilled,to make the year come back againa recurring prayer. The stairs seem endless,lifelong, and those peaks too, Annapurna, Dhaulagiri;uncertain, impressive as gods. I dare not gointo the dark, dank sanctum where the myth shiftsswiftly from hand to hand, eye to eye. The dried, sacrificedflowers smile at me. I have become; a diamond in my eye.Vague grieving years pit against the distant peakslike a dying butterfly as a bearded, saffron-robedman asks me, firmly: Are you a Hindoo? Jayanta Mahapatra


Of that Love Of that love, of that milewalked together in the rain,only a weariness remains. I am that stranger nowmy mirror holds to me;the moment's silencehardly moves across the glass.I pity myself in another's guise. And no one's back here, no oneI can recognize, and from my sideI see nothing. Years have passedsince I sat with you, watchingthe sky grow lonelier with cloudlessness,waiting for your body to make it lived in. Jayanta Mahapatra


Sanskrit Awaken them; they are knobs of soundthat seem to melt and crumple uplike some jellyfish of tropical seas,torn from sleep with a hand lined by prophecies.Listen hard; their male, gaunt world sprawls the pagelike rows of tree trunks reeking in the smokeof ages, the branches glazed and deadas though longing to make up with the sky,but having lost touch with themselveswere unable to find themselves, hold meaning. And yet, down the steps into the water at Varanasi,where the lifeless bodies seem to grow human,the shaggy heads of word-buds move back and forthbetween the harsh castanets of the rainand the noiseless feathers of summer -aware that their syllables' overwhelming silencewould not escape the hearers now, and whichmust remain that mysterious divine pathguarded by drifts of queer, quivering banyans:a language of clogs over cobbles, castingits uncertain spell, trembling sadly into mist. Jayanta Mahapatra


Sickles Dust seems in no hurry now, sailingthe air. A ten-year-old girlruns after her home-bound cowsthrough the ingenious sunset hour,glancing briefly as we pass bybut gives no sign that she has seen us. The day's last lightsurprises us, leaving everyonesuddenly on an endless, desolate shore.And a small desire to make love then.Women returning home from fields of ripe graincarry sickles in their tired hands.The cut paddies cling to their quiet perches. How little I understand myself,among children who are mothers alreadybefore the floods come, wetting the reeds on the shore;among women desired, even as we areindifferent to happenings by which they are possessed. How the sickles shimmer with the reds of sunsethidden in the twilight of their veins Jayanta Mahapatra


Summer Not yet.Under the mango treeThe cold ash of a deserted fire. Who needs the future? A ten-year-old girlcombs her mother's hair,where crows of rivalriesare quietly nesting. The home will neverbe hers. In a corner of her minda living green mangodrops softly to earth. Jayanta Mahapatra


Taste For Tomorrow At Puri, the crows. The one wide streetlolls out like a giant tongue. Five faceless lepers move asideas a priest passes by. And at the streets endthe crowds thronging the temple door:a huge holy flowerswaying in the wind of greater reasons. Jayanta Mahapatra


The Captive Air Of Chandipur-On-Sea Day after day the drunk sea at Chandipurspits out the gauze wings of shells along the beachand rumples the thin air behind the sands.Who can tell of the songs of this sea that go onto baffle and double the space around our lives?Or of smells paralysed through the centuries,of deltas hard and white that stretched onceto lure the feet of women bidding their men goodbye?Or of salt and light that dark and provocative eyesdemanded, their shoulders drooping like lotusesin the noonday sun? And what is it now that scatters the tidein the shadow of this proud watercourse?The ridicule of the dead?Sussurant sails still whisperlegends on the horizon: who are you,occupant of the silent sigh of the conch?The ground seems only a memory now, a torn breath,and as we wait for the tide to flood the mudflatsthe song that reaches our ears is just our own.The cries of fishermen come drifting through the spray,music of what the world has lost. Jayanta Mahapatra


The Indian Way The long, dying silence of the rainover the hillsopens one's touch,a feeling for the soul's substance,as for the opal neckspiralling the inside of a shell. We keep calm; the voices move.I buy you the morning's lotus. we would return again and againto the movementthat is neither forward nor backward,making usstop moving, without regret. You know:I will not touch you, like _thatuntil our wedding night. Jayanta Mahapatra


The Moon Moments The faint starlight rolls restlessly on the mat. Those women talking outside have clouds passing across their eyes. Always there is a moon that is taking me somewhere. Why does one room invariably lead into other room? We, opening in time our vague doors, convinced that our minds lead to something never allowed before, sit down hurt under the trees, feeding it simply because it is there, as the wind does, blowing against the tree. Yet time is not clairvoyant, and if it has the answer to our lives, proud in its possession of that potential which can change our natures, beating the visions of childhood out of us, the socialism and the love, until we remain awkwardly swung to the great north of honour. What humility is that which will not let me reveal the real? What shameful secret lies hidden in the shadows of my moon? All these years; our demands no longer hurt our eyes. How can I stop the life I lead within myself- The startled, pleading question in my hands lying in my lap while the gods go by, triumphant, in the sacked city at midnight? Jayanta Mahapatra


The Vase The strong south wind hits our faces again,it's October;sunsets are fiery redand the waters of wells are clear already-there we are, under the mango tree,in the old house, amid the drift of things,the vase on the bookcasewith shadows of swifts reeling round it,and we don't know whether we are alone any more. But each daywe watch the swifts come and go,watch the still-slender, teasing whorewho shuffles down the crowded road and finds outthat the middle-aged man surreptitiously following heris only listening to the slowing soundsof his own heart; and we sit and longfor the child who left in 'seventy-three,and behave like our bitch that catches a scentand sniffs about in the air. We look around today and the day after tomorrow,remembering those who caught us like irrigation-canalsacross the dry nights in the distant countryside,and remembering, suddenly, someonewho once envied us and our bodiesso impudent, glistening with rain. Ah, this voice I hear now,what answer do I owe you?The tree trembles in the wind,the house where we once made lovenow weakens at the knees. And all the timethat gathered into those momentsfills the grave of the vast vase with dust. Jayanta Mahapatra


Traveler Every eveningthe bells of the temple close byrest their easy weight on the bones;it's time again to wonderwhat I'll do with what I learn.A warm vapor risesfrom the darkening earth like a hope.Somewhere, inside a room,a girl is dying in her mother's arms.Elsewhere, someonerevenges himself for his broken life.I look at people. At my little misery.Beyond, at a jasmine's sad sweet smile.Movement here has purpose:It is not cold and tired.The deer chasing the new growth of grass.The drum thumping against the sky.The woman with her knees drawn to her chest.And the wind that deceives itselfit has tellingly carried the scream of the girlwho is dying in her mother's arms.My knowledge and my timefail to quiet to nightunlike the flutter of birds.I try to wear this weight lightly.But the weight of the unknown buries me. Jayanta Mahapatra


Twilight An orange flarelights the pale panes of the hospitalin a final wish of daylight.It's not yet dark. In the chiildren's wardunder a mother's facethe dead, always so young.Water startles in the river's throat. Its cry:a plea to share in its curse? Somewhere, this twilight shall falland hide the whiteness of jasmines about to bloom. Newly-lit lampsin the houses across the streetmake me look out at the wet August eveningthat holds up the vast unknownin such small delicate hands. Jayanta Mahapatra


jayanta mahapatra - poems - - poemhunter.com: … has authored 18 books of poems. he started writing...

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